Thursday, February 10, 2011

Yesterday's news. With jokes.

You know the problem with topical humor? It has to be topical.

Sometimes you think of a really great joke that would have been hilarious...four months ago. Sometimes you sit on that joke for years afterward, bitter and angry. Sometimes you cry yourself to sleep over it and wake up a hollow shell of a man. Yeah, we take our humor seriously around here.

For example, Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom put off his January inauguration for a week for political reasons. Which might have prompted us to say this:

"Gavin Newsom was finally sworn in today after a week of stalling. Yeah, I would probably put off moving to Sacramento for as long as I could too."

Oh yes, major Sacramento burn. And you know what? There would have been pretty much nothing they could do about it. Because they're Sacramento. If only I had thought of it back when it was relevant.

Actually, I did have a chance to squeeze that one onto the teleprompter at the last minute before the most recent show, but then I didn't do it because I was too busy forgetting to do it.

Some jokes stay funny for years, but they're like that tire with a slow leak; the more time goes by, the less safe it is to use them. Although I never once got ticketed because an untimely joke caused my hubcap to blow off and injure an elderly man and his clinically prescribed therapeutic dachshund.

Can anyone place this reference anymore:

"I don't want to sound like a cynic guys, but I'm starting to think that OJ is just never gonna find the real killer."

Yeah, that one had a pretty good shelf-life for a while, but after a decade or so nobody remembered that he had said that in the first place. And then fate conspired to pretty much ruin it forever. Damn justice system.

Over the years, it got to the point where making jokes about Michael Jackson was like taking a dump on a compost heap; there really wasn't anything of significance that you could add.

Then he died, the world starting loving him again, and at that point a Michael Jackson joke became like taking a dump on a tire fire; there wasn't anything you could add, and the blowback was downright toxic.

There was probably a narrow window after his death but before it became off-topic when we could have said this:

"You know it's amazing, the funeral home said it was the first time they'd ever had a body that came to them pre-embalmed."